According to an article in the New York Times, Jewish Americans have higher IQ’s than other Americans. There’s an old saying “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” so we should expect great wealth to be especially common among Ashkenazi Americans, given their IQ’s. Despite being 2% of the U.S. population, Jewish Americans are an astonishing 35% of the 400 richest Americans. This implies that U.S. billionaires are 1.67 standard deviations more Jewish than the general U.S. population. Assuming this Jewish over-representation was caused by the high level of Jewish intelligence, we can estimate the average billionaire IQ to be 2.9 SD above the U.S. mean or roughly IQ 143 (to understand the math, see here).

I would expect billionaires (at least the generation that made the wealth) to be extremely smart given that from a Darwinian perspective, intelligence is the mental ability to adapt any situation to your advantage. In addition, the rise of computer geeks, many of whom are billionaires and probably have IQ’s pushing 170 (a couple Microsoft billionaires reportedly scored perfect on the old SAT (IQ 171), though such claims tend to get exaggerated), is another reason to expect billionaires to be super-smart.

On the other hand, 143 is incredibly high given that IQ only explains about 16% of the variation in income (other factors like luck, hard work, ambition, good looks, charisma, special talents, connections etc, also matter a lot). For example Sara Blakely claims she flunked the LSAT, yet became the youngest self-made female billionaire largely because Oprah loved the footless pantyhose she created. Blakely is hardly an outlier. Dr. Bill Cosby was never a billionaire, but he was one of 400 richest Americans back in the early 1990s, and he claims to have scored 500 on the old SAT (IQ 85). Cosby’s obviously way smarter than IQ 85, and probably smarter than IQ 115 (in my humble opinion, the SAT is biased against kids from lower socio-economic background) but a good scientist can not throw out data arbitrarily:

If we assume that IQ’s on the Forbes 400 range from 85 (Cosby) to 170 (Microsoft), we might estimate that the average IQ would be about 130, a lot lower than what we’d expect from the extreme levels of Jewish over-representation.

As the hyper-educated blog commentator Pincher Martin noted, focusing on only Jewish representation can be misleading when trying to estimate the IQ of high achievers. It’s much wiser to look at other ethnic groups too.

Big Brained Oprah is still America’s only black billionaire

HBD has a sleazy reputation because back in the 19th century, HBD people were very mean to blacks and women, saying they were poor and powerless because they had small brains. We now know there are incredibly brilliant and big brained people in all large races and genders, and I find it absolutely fascinating that the only African American on Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans is arguably the biggest brained member of both her race and her gender.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense, because brain size tripled in 4 million years of human evolution because only our biggest brained ancestors were typically adaptable enough to acquire enough resources to survive. Today, we have a social-safety net, so even small brained people survive, but the big brained Oprah has acquired orders of magnitude more resources (wealth) than most most Americans. It’s almost like you need some kind of rare biological advantage to become a billionaire. According to this New York Timesarticle, Ashkenazi Jews might have IQ enhancing genes associated with certain diseases, and according to pumpkinperson, Oprah has a stratospheric brain size helping her to compete with the greatest Ashkenazi entrepeneurs.

Back in 1993, when you only needed about $330 million to make the Forbes 400 list of richest American, Bill Cosby was the only African-American to qualify, but big-brained Oprah was making money at record speed, and Cosby advised his young friend to always sign her own cheques. She took this advice, and the next year, with a net-worth of $340 million, she had dethroned him as the only African American on the list. Today, you need over a billion to make Forbes 400, and with a net-worth of nearly $3 billion, Oprah remains the only African American on the Forbes 400 (though the 2014 list hasn’t been released yet, but should be published any day now).

Estimating the IQ of the Forbes 400 from African-American under-representation

If African Americans are 12% of America, but 0.25% of the Forbes 400, then that means that the Forbes 400 is 1.6 SD less black than America as a whole. Does that mean that the Forbes 400 is 1.6 SD more intelligent than America as a whole? Of course not, because the correlation between IQ and sub-Saharan ancestry is small, and Oprah is probably a lot smarter than the average billionaire because she has far greater brain size and cultural influence and overcame adversity and very humble origins to achieve her wealth in such a competitive and improvisational field.

If there were a perfect negative correlation between IQ and African ancestry within the U.S., then the 12% Americans who are black would all be in bottom 12% of American IQ (below 83) and thus have an average IQ around the 6 %ile (IQ 77). But in reality, the average African-American has an IQ of 87 (perhaps higher in the younger generation raised in the post-civil rights era), so they score only 13 points lower than the U.S. mean of 100 on average (though some blacks score in the stratosphere), not 23 points lower. This implies that if it were possible to measure race on a continuous scale, African ancestry would correlate -0.57 with IQ (13/23). But since IQ only correlates 0.85 with general intelligence, and socially classified race probably only correlates 0.9 with actual ancestry, we need to divide 0.57 by 0.85 and then 0.9 to see that African ancestry has a true g loading of -0.75. Thus, the fact that U.S. billionaires are 1.6 SD less African-American than the U.S. as whole, suggests their average level of g is 2.13 SD higher than the U.S. average. But since even good IQ tests typically have only a 0.85 g loading, we multiply by 0.85, suggesting a mean IQ of 1.81 above the U.S. mean (IQ 127).

Two conflicting estimates

Based on Ashkenazi over-representation I estimate the Forbes 400 to have a mean IQ of 143 but based on African American under-representation, I estimate it to be 127. Let’s split the difference and assume the average self-made billionaire has an IQ around 135. Of course my analysis involved all members of the Forbes 400, not self-made members only, but since the children and spouses who inherit billions are virtually always the same ethnicity as those who made it, the ethnic distribution of the former just reflects the ethnic distribution of the latter several decades ago, even though trust-fund babies cognitively regress precipitously to the mean. Note that an IQ of 135 is similar to the IQ of 130 I estimated above for the Forbes 400, based on the SAT scores of Cosby and Microsoft billionaires.

Based on the 0.4 correlation between IQ and income, you’d expect people who are on average +5 SD in income to be (5 SD)(0.4) = +2 SD in IQ (IQ 130). It’s also worth noting that U.S. presidents (who live the life-style of a billionaire, despite earning only six figures in office) seem to have an average IQ around 130.

Estimating the IQ of the homeless

Although African-Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, they are 38% of the homeless. This implies the homeless population is 0.93 SD more African American than America as a whole. Dividing this figure by -0.75 and multiplying by 0.85 (see above) suggests the homeless has a mean IQ that is -1.054 SD below the U.S. average (roughly IQ 84).

In the complete sample of homeless individuals, a full-scale IQ score of 84.3 was reported. This is significantly lower than is estimated for the normal population. Indeed, 19.2% of the sample scored in the “extremely low” range, having IQ scores less than 70. Our findings are consistent with previous reports of IQ in homeless samples, which ranged from the “low average” (Seidman et al.,1997) to “average” range (Louks & Smith, 1988). Using the same IQ test as used in our study (WASI), Solliday-McRoy and colleagues (2004) studied a sample of homeless shelter residents in the United States and found a mean full-scale IQ of 83.7, with 20% scoring in the “extremely low” range. This finding is very similar to that found in our U.K. sample.

An average IQ of 84 for the homeless is consistent with pumpkinperson’s law: Average IQ varies 8 points with every ten-fold increase or decrease in financial success:

Three figure income earners (the homeless): Average IQ 84

Four figure income earners (part-time minimum wage): Average IQ 92

Five figure income earners (middle class): Average IQ 100

Six figure income earners (future millionaires): Average IQ 108

Self-made deca-millionaires: Average IQ 116

Self-made centi-millionaires: Average IQ 124

Self-made billionaires: Average IQ 132

Self-made deca-billionaires: Average IQ 140

If you made your money in STEM, add 10 IQ points to the expected IQ of your income. If you made your money in a low-brow occupation like selling pantyhose, perhaps subtract 10 points from the expected IQ for your income. And obviously there is enormous variability within each economic class, with some homeless people being smarter than most self-made billionaires.

And so I picked up the phone and began dialing the phone number of the University of Western Ontario, but before the phone had finished ringing I hung up. I was terrified that I would look foolish for even trying to discuss something as lowbrow and pop-culture as a daytime talk show host with a learned scholar. I was also terrified that he would be the racist the media had portrayed him as and would be furious that I even suggested a black woman could be brilliant. I realize these fears sound childish, but I was only a high school kid at the time and a pretty immature one. Finally I decided to walk through my fear and dial the number. I think a switch board operator came on, and I asked to speak with J. Philippe Ruhston, and as his direct line began to ring, part of me was hoping he wouldn’t pick up, and then:

“Phil Rushton, here” he answered.

After making a bit of small talk, I asked him if he had ever seen The Oprah Winfrey Show. He had seen it a few times he replied. I mentioned that her head size was enormous.

“I would imagine that a lot of these black entertainers are very intelligent,” he replied.

“Her head is twenty-five and a quarter inches around,” I explained.

“Where did you get that figure?” he asked, quite startled.

I explained that Oprah had mentioned the figure on her show, in the context of explaining why she has to have her hats custom made.

“Isn’t that interesting that hers should be so big. I’ll have to take a closer look the next time I see her on television”

I then asked him what he thought Oprah’s IQ was, given her incredible wealth. He evaded the question, saying only that she was a unique combination of genes, but did finally say “there are always going to be those who are way off in the top 1%. And indeed one would have to be to succeed in a field as competitive as television talk shows.”

It was unclear whether he meant she was in the top 1% of the general population, or the the top 1% of her race, since Rushton was a race scholar, but either way, the conversation went so well that I would start phoning him once every couple months. On cold dark Canadian afternoons, I would make a nice cup of hot chocolate against the cold outside and phone this brilliant eloquent man I regarded (and still regard) as the Darwin of the 20th century. It was the best education you could have, and I think for him too, it was rewarding to finally talk to someone who was interested in his theories entirely for their scientific value, with no political or ideological motivation whatsoever, and even while still in high school, I had a PhD level of knowledge of intelligence research and I would ask questions he considered “stimulating”, questions that required “a great deal of thought”.

But in life nothing lasts forever, and sadly, Rushton and I drifted apart. I developed an interest in the Flynn effect and was interested to learn that Victorians had scored the same as modern Africans on culture reduced IQ tests. I thought Rushton would also find it interesting because he did a lot of cross-cultural IQ testing, administering culture reduced IQ tests to South African Blacks and European Roma…but he didn’t find it interesting, he found it boring and would have none of it.

It turned out Rushton was one of those “The Flynn effect is irrelevant” people. He found it prima facie absurd that we could have been a nation of mentally disabled people a century ago. It simply didn’t make any sense to him, given the outstanding achievements of early 20th century society. But it didn’t make any sense to me why the same tests that were culture reduced enough to measure the intelligence of South Africans could be so wrong when measuring Victorian intelligence. I needed an explanation. The Flynn effect is unrelated to g (general intelligence) and that was enough for him to just dismiss it and move on.

But in one of our last conversations, he told me that he thought my Oprah discovery was absolutely fascinating and encouraged me to publish it in an academic journal. I decided it would be much easier to just publish it on my blog instead; I just deeply regret having waited so long to do so, because I had no idea he would die so young.

I realize many people were deeply offended by his theories and I have great empathy for that, but Rushton deserves great credit for maintaining his convictions and dignity in the face of unimaginable academic, media, and political hostility. And when I see this video, it makes me smile:

A person on twitter recently implied that the extremely high IQ I estimated for Oprah was inconsistent with some of the irrational ideas she seems to believe. Of course rationality is subjective. I for example feel it’s irrational to believe in God, however I’ve watched in amazement as arguably the World’s biggest brained and highest IQ theist Chris Langan made fools out of atheists for denying God’s existence. For how can one “know” there is no God?

“The same way you can know anything else”, said America’s highest IQ woman Marilyn Vos Savant when a reader asked her that very question. “By judging the substance of the evidence and drawing a conclusion. If we insisted on first hand verification, we would know very little…”

And the smartest person I ever corresponded with was a hardcore atheist because he could not respect any mind that would suspend all reason when it comes to the most important questions in life.

When Phil Donahue told legendary atheist Ayn Rand that she wasn’t smart enough to know there was no God, she replied “Yes I am. And so is everyone in this room. That doesn’t take much intelligence.”

Many studies show that religiosity is negatively correlated with IQ, so I would imagine that atheists are more intelligent than agnostics who are more intelligent than the spiritual who are more intelligent than the religious. These would be average differences of course, and some hardcore religious fundamentalists are much more intelligent than even most strident atheists.

Oprah was raised hardcore religious in the rural South, but gradually drifted away from the dogma and began defining God in such liberal and meaningless ways that she provoked the ire of both religious and atheist extremists. Despite distancing herself from the church, she has occasionally been accused of promoting ideas that mainstream scientists would consider pseudoscience and/or magical thinking. The biggest example of this is The Secret which argues that wishing/believing/imagining you can achieve something will cause that belief to come true. When Oprah saw that book becoming popular, she enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon, arguing that she had independently discovered this law of the universe decades earlier and was excited that someone had written such a popular book about it. However Oprah cautioned that the The Secret was only one law operating in the universe and that it’s not the explanation for all success or failure.

Now in fairness, there’s no doubt that positive thinking is useful. For example, on pg 576 of The g Factor, Arthur Jensen notes that an important personality trait in successful life outcomes is locus of control (the belief that you have the power to shape your destiny). And noting that applying to Harvard is a better predictor of future income than attending Harvard, Steve Sailer writes“I suspect that how much money somebody makes correlates to a surprising extent with how much money they expect to make and/or think they deserve to make.” It’s only when The Secret implies that thoughts in and of themselves create reality (without intermediaries like behavior) that it becomes irrational.

Another seemingly irrational belief-system Oprah has strongly endorsed is the perspective of Gary Zukav (author of The Seat of the Soul) which argues that humans are evolving from five-sensory beings that seek physical power (i.e. wealth, military strength) to multi-sensory beings that seek authentic power (inner peace) and that the universe is wise and compassionate and constantly trying to align us with our soul’s purpose.
Oprah argues it’s important to listen to the signs the universe is giving us so that we can flow with the current of the universe rather than trying to swim upstream.

So how can I claim Oprah is brilliant when she promotes such “pseudo-scientific magical thinking”? I believe there are 3 major explanations:

1) Although I argue that Oprah’s overall IQ is 140, I believe she has a very lop-sided intelligence, with her verbal IQ and social IQ being much higher than her mathematical IQ and technological IQ (as she herself would probably agree). Indeed I estimated that her math IQ is “only” 113, which while high compared to most Americans, would be low for a self-made billionaire.

If you are mediocre at math, you are mediocre at logic and rationality and thus critical thinking. You are also more likely to suffer from what’s called bounded cognition, because if you don’t understand probability theory, it’s easy to believe that the freak coincidences that we observe in life are signs from the universe. This would be especially true for someone like Oprah who must have had incredible good luck to have gone from poverty to the most successful woman in the world in only a few decades. In order for that to happen, a lot of random events must have lined up perfectly, putting her in exactly the right place at the right time to use her considerable gifts. It’s very easy to view such unusual randomness as evidence as some kind of magical process if you don’t have the statistical understanding to realize that extreme coincidences happen all the time.

One extreme coincidence that helped launch Oprah’s career was the fact that when she was still just a local star in Chicago (not yet nationally famous) she was incredibly obsessed with Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, and didn’t realize that one of the producers for the film adaptation just happened to be in her city, see her on local TV (knowing nothing about her) and instantly think she would be perfect to play a character in the film named Sophia, who just happened to be married to a character named Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards)! It would take incredible rationality to not revert to magical thinking when you experience that level of serendipity.

2) Just as relatively low math IQ can cause magical thinking, I believe a high social IQ can also cause magical thinking. For example, a low social IQ is one of the defining traits in autism, and on some dimensions, autism appears to be the opposite of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is characterized by extreme magical thinking to the point of being delusional. I’m not in any way suggesting Oprah is schizophrenic (on the contrary, her mental health is excellent); but I am suggesting that there’s a neuro-evolutionary continuum (probably on the r-K dimension), where at the K end of the spectrum you are more prone to low social IQ (relative to overall IQ), autism, and hyper-rational pro-science views, and at the r end of the spectrum, you’re more prone to high social IQ (relative to overall IQ), but lower math IQ and more magical thinking.

It’s been noted that the central deficit in autism is hypo-mentalizing (the failure to adequately consider that other people have minds with feelings and intentions just like you). By contrast, incredibly socially intelligent people like Oprah are so good at mentalizing that they likely even ascribe mental states in mindless entities like the universe. So when random events helped make Oprah rich and famous, she was likely to believe the universe was intentionally trying to help her. An incredibly high social IQ combined with a mediocre math IQ is likely very common in spiritual thought leaders like Oprah and probably would have been found among the prophets of the World’s great religions.

Social IQ > Math IQ is a dangerous combinations because it makes one especially prone to irrational beliefs while at the same time makes them especially skilled at getting others to follow these beliefs. By contrast, scientists tend to have the opposite profile, so despite being correct, often lack the social IQ to persuade the public.

3) A final, and more sinister reason why someone as brilliant as Oprah might promote irrational ideas is that she doesn’t actually believe them but just cleverly used them to attract a larger and more obedient audience by pretending to have some magical solution to most of life’s problems. By claiming for example that she has lived her life according to the laws of The Secret, she quickly became the poster-girl for that wildly successful movement, since her astonishing success was the greatest proof that The Secret works. This caused Oprah’s show to be must-watch TV for all the fans of The Secret and allowed Oprah to claim credit for The Secret‘s success, further enhancing her image as a cultural trendsetter. While this may sound incredibly cynical, a former producer of Oprah’s named Elizabeth Coady claimed that Oprah is a calculating master-manipulator who doesn’t actually believe what she says. Of course Coady is a disgruntled ex-employee who was likely bitter that a confidentiality agreement prevented her from profiting off a tell-all book a book about Oprah, so she may not be the most objective witness.

Although I came of age at the peak of Oprah’s cultural influence, I was not particularly interested in her until the day I overheard her talking on TV about the fact that her hats have to be custom made because her head is so large. It quickly occurred to me that at some time in her her life, Oprah may have been not only the most powerful and prosperous woman in the world, but also, the biggest brained woman in the world. Historically, Social Darwinism was used to diminish women, minorities, and the poor, so to see a black woman from such humble origins be so impressive on perhaps the two most Darwinian correlates of intelligence (money/power and brain size) was incredibly inspirational.

In 2010, Time.com asked Oprah and 11 other of America’s top female business leaders (as selected by Fortune magazine) to answer five questions. The questions were:

1) What is the best and worst decision you’ve ever made?
2) What was your dream job as a kid and why?
3) What do you think is the most significant barrier to female leadership?
4) What woman inspires you and why?
5) What will be the biggest challenge for the generation of women behind you?

I emailed the author of the Time piece telling him how scientifically valuable it was to see so many successful women all agreeing to answer the same set of questions. I did not tell him the purpose of my research but he informed me that he had published the exact unedited words of the women themselves. Most of the women (including Oprah) had emailed their answers to him directly, though a few responded by phone.

Because Oprah had answered the same questions, in mostly the same way (email, complete sentences, a few paragraphs per question), for the same publication, for the same purpose, as 11 other women with similar occupational status, this was a rare opportunity to measure Oprah’s cognitive ability on a highly standardized task against a very comparable control group. But how does one measure intelligence from a sample of writing? A Promethean once, somewhat facetiously, estimated my IQ by doing a Flesch-Kincaid readability calculation on an article I had published. I’ve explored this methodology and while it seems to give somewhat valid results in children, in adults it seems to reward a long-winded ostentatious writing style, which doesn’t make for efficient communication. Clearly a better method was needed…

The Nun Study

While searching for ways to estimate intelligence from writing, I came across the most fascinating study I have ever read. In the Nun Study, Dr. David Snowdon, a leading expert on Alzheimer’s disease, convinced a group of elderly nuns to take cognitive tests and allow their brains to be examined postmortem. This allowed Snowdon and his colleagues to identify dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in the older nuns, but Snowdon wondered if dementia in the elderly could be predicted from cognitive ability in young adulthood. Unfortunately, there were no available mental test scores from when the nuns were young.

Then Snowdon and his team discovered a goldmine. A stack of handwritten one page autobiographies that the nuns had written roughly six decades earlier when they first joined the convent as young women. Because the nuns had written autobiographies of similar length, for the same purpose, following identical instructions about what topics to include, these writing samples were highly comparable and provided an excellent window into the nuns’ early life cognitive ability. But Snowdon asked the same question I would ask years later. How do you measure cognitive ability from a language sample? Snowdon tried various methods like looking at the level of vocabulary each autobiography contained, but craved a more effective technique.

Idea Density

According to his book about the Nun Study (Aging with Grace), Snowdon decided to contact a language expert to help him analyze the biographies. He phoned the brilliant psycholinguist Dr. Susan Kemper who suggested that the most powerful way to measure mental ability from language samples is to quantify both idea density and, separately, grammatical complexity. Grammatical complexity is related to working memory and ranges from simple one-clause sentences to complex sentences with multiple forms of embedding and subordination. By contrast, idea density measures how succinctly you express yourself.

Intelligence can be defined as the cognitive ability to adapt (i.e. problem solve, turn situations to your advantage). If an advantage is a benefit, and a disadvantage is a cost, one could define intelligence as the mental capacity for low cost/benefit behavior, which is why making a lot of money for doing very little work is considered smart, all else being equal. In a trivial sense, every word we say or write has a cost (in the time it takes to write it, and the time it takes others to read it), but every idea we express is a benefit because we’ve communicated something of substance. So generally speaking, the more ideas we can express with as few words as possible, the lower the cost/benefit ratio of our behavior and the more intelligently we’ve behaved.

Amazingly, the idea density from just the last 10 sentences of the nun’s autobiographies correlated a potent 0.6 with their scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (a brief measure of global cognitive ability) administered roughly six decades later. This is higher than the correlation of two different actual IQ tests administered in youth and old age, for example an outstanding study by scholar Ian Deary and his colleagues, published in the prestigious journal Intelligencefound that the Moray House Test scores at age 11 correlated 0.48 with Raven scores at age 77, though the correlation was higher in women (0.55). Thus, the 0.6 correlation roughly six decades later with the Mini-Mental State Examination would seem to validate idea density as a measure of intelligence; indeed idea density is said to reflect overall neurocognitive development, rather than just a specific talent like verbal ability.

Snowdon and his colleagues were not surprised that idea density (and to a lesser extent grammatical complexity) predicted cognitive functioning in later life. The theory of cognitive reserve predicts that people with extra capacity (i.e. large brains, well developed minds) are able to delay the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s longer because when their brains are afflicted by disease, they have enough extra brain mass and enough extra brain power to compensate for the damage. However the surprising finding of the Nun Study was that idea density also strongly predicted getting Alzheimer’s in the first place. Snowdon claimed in his book that simply by measuring the idea density in the last ten sentences of autobiographies written in the early 20s, they were able to predict with 80% accuracy which nuns would have the Alzheimer’s level of brain tangles at autopsy six decades later. This suggests that by age 20, many people already have very incipient Alzheimer’s that shows up linguistically in extremely subtle ways, but doesn’t progress into dementia until six decades later.

The results of the Nun Study were so astonishing that it made the cover of Time magazine and Snowdon was interviewed by Oprah’s old talk show rival, Phil Donahue.

The Nun Study makes the cover of Time magazine

Measuring the idea density of Oprah and other female elite business leaders

There was something symbolic about using a study of nuns (spiritual women) as a model to estimate Oprah’s intelligence since Oprah was preaching at her church at the age of three and decades later, would emerge as perhaps the most influential spiritual leader, ushering in a culture of secular new-age thinking. And just as the highly educated nuns studied by Snowdon and Kemper were exceptionally accomplished women for the standards for women in their generation, Oprah and the 11 female business elites I compare her idea density to, are exceptionally accomplished for the standards for women today.

I measured the idea density of Oprah and the 11 other elite female business leaders by pasting all the answers they gave to Time.com’s questions into a computer program called CPIDR 3.2.2785.24603. To illustrate how CPIDR works, consider the following two sentences:

1) I live in a house that is big.
2) I live in a big house.

Both sentences say the same thing, but because sentence 2, says it with fewer words, it has a higher idea density (also known as proposition density). CPIDR scores sentence 1 at 0.375 while sentence 2 gets a score of 0.5. Before scoring language samples on CPIDR, Dr. Susan Kemper advises that all multi-word names of people, places or dates be replaced by placeholders because long names add more words without adding more information and thus spuriously lower the ratio of propositions to words. Thus, the sentence “My name is John Smith and I was born in Dallas, Texas on October 31, 1877” should be entered into CPIDR as “My name is NAME and I was born in PLACE on DATE.”

Once such changes were made, Oprah’s answers to Time.com’s questions clocked in at 0.542. By comparison, the answers of the other 11 elite business leaders (the reference group) averaged 0.532 (Standard Deviation (SD) = 0.031)(Range = 0.489 to 0.610). Thus Oprah scored 0.32 SD above the reference group. It should be noted that these idea densitities are generally lower than those reported for nuns in the nun study, and that’s because CPIDR gives an indirect measure of idea density which produces lower scores than the directly measured idea density of the nun study. But the two methods are extremely high correlated, despite this systematic difference.

It should be noted however that Oprah was born in 1954 and the average birth year of the other 11 women was about 1960. Because Kemper’s research shows that idea density declines (within the same person) precipitously with age in a very linear way, beginning perhaps in the 20s, age adjustments are essential. Kemper found that a group of older adults (mean age 76.4) had a mean proposition density that was 1.56 SD lower than younger adults (mean age 22.8). This implies that idea density declines at a rate of 0.029 SD a year. Since Oprah is six years older than the average woman in the reference group, I added 6(0.029 SD) to her score, which increased it to 0.494 SD above the reference group.

Converting idea density to IQ

If one assumes that idea density correlates about as well with IQ as two different IQ tests correlate with one another, then one can convert idea density into IQ equivalent scores using a psychometric technique known as equipercentile equating or score pairing (see section 8.4.1 of this Prometheus document). Score pairing assumes that if a group of people get scores on two quite g loaded mental tests, x and y, then the distribution of x will mirror the distribution of y. That is to say if 50% of a sample is above the 98 percentile on X, then 50% of the sample should be above the 98 percentile on Y. That doesn’t mean the same individuals in the sample will be above the 98 percentile of both X and Y, it just means that being above the sample mean on X is as statistically rare as being above the sample mean on Y, and X and Y are equivalent and interchangeable measures of intelligence.

Thus, in order to convert Oprah’s idea density into an IQ equivalent, one must know the IQ distribution of the reference group she’s being compared to. The reference group were all women Fortune magazine ranks among the 50 most powerful in business. In a previous post, I noted that the average IQ of all Fortune 500 CEOs is likely about 124, but the tiny subset of women who crash through the glass ceiling to reach the top of American business likely average a brilliant IQ of 131. Assuming they have a similar IQ variability as the general population (SD 15), and assuming idea density and IQ scores are statistically interchangeable, then Oprah being 0.494 SD more idea dense than this outstanding group implies an extremely high IQ of 0.494(15) + 131 = 138. An IQ of roughly 140 is consistent with a previous analysis where I used multiple regression to predict Oprah’s IQ from Darwinian correlates of intelligence (income and brain size). It is also consistent with my historiometric estimate of Oprah’s childhood IQ. When disparate methodologies converge on one conclusion, probable truth is implied.

In the following video, Oprah displays high idea density by asking a complex question succinctly:

It may seem surprising that a mere daytime talk show host from the backwoods of Mississippi is more intelligent than most elite female business leaders, many of whom have attended the best colleges in America and are CEOs of some of the biggest high tech companies. But one must remember that Oprah’s brain size, wealth and impact on the culture is immensely greater than that of the other elite female business leaders, implying greater ability, especially since she overcame poverty and adversity to dominate the ultra competitive, improvisational and creative field of TV talk shows. High intelligence was likely a factor in Oprah immediately overtaking the very bright former talk show king Phil Donahue in the television ratings. Back in the 1980s, Newsday‘s Les Payne observed:

Oprah Winfrey is sharper than Donahue, wittier, more genuine, and far better attuned to her audience, if not the world.

And British actress and Cambridge graduate Thandie Newton believes incredible intelligence made a Oprah a good film actress too, stating:

I’ve worked with lots of good actors, and I know Oprah hasn’t made many films. I was stunned. She’s a very strong technical actress, and it’s because she’s so smart. She’s acute. She’s got a mind like a razor blade.

A few caveats

Of course this entire analysis assumes idea density is a good measure of intelligence. While the Nun Study showed that idea density in youth does an impressive job predicting intelligence and Alzheimer’s in old age, one can’t necessarily assume that idea density is a good measure of pre-elderly intelligence. Although it’s normally true that if a test predicts intelligence decades later, it does an even better job predicting intelligence contemporaneously, one of the ironies of the Nun Study is that idea density measured in youth failed to correlate with the nuns’ academic grades in youth. This may suggest that idea density is a very sensitive measure of intelligence that can be impaired by the smallest tangles in the brain many decades before the tangles increase to the point of diminishing intelligence on the whole. If so, idea density in the relatively young may be a poor measure of contemporaneous intelligence, but an excellent measure of how well one will maintain their intelligence with age.

The strongest evidence of Oprah having extremely high intelligence all comes from when she was extremely young (she could read, write, recite, and do arithmetic by age 3). And idea density suggests she will have extremely high intelligence when she is extremely old (relative to the elderly). And yet during her peak intellectual years (late teens), she studied only easy subjects at a very modest college. Perhaps extremely precocious toddlers regress to the mean in young adulthood, only to come home to their original brilliance in old age. But of course, drawing such sweeping conclusions from largely anecdotal evidence involving only one person would be extremely foolish.

The National Enquirer, May 14, 1996, reporting on Oprah’s stratospheric head size

My head is so big I have to wear TWO wigs

– Oprah Winfrey, 1996

I’ve been told that when one talks about intelligence, there are so many different parts to it. It’s pattern recognition, memorization, verbal ability, spatial ability, numerical ability, social comprehension, musical talents, self-awareness, lateral thinking, logic, intuition, and so much, much more. But if one wants a single umbrella to cover ALL of intelligence, then some say it’s the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage. The adaptative value of intelligence is demonstrated by the fact that brain size nearly tripled in just the last 4 million years, from 500 cm3 in Australopithecenes to 800 cm3 in Homo habilis to 1000 cm3 in Homo erectus to about 1350 cm3 in modern Homo sapiens (higher in the developed world where nutrition is good).

So the reason humans are considered the most intelligent animal is that despite having so many disadvantages (we lack fur, strength, speed, claws, sharp teeth, wings) we were able to adapt the world to our advantage. We didn’t have fur, so we created fur coats. We didn’t have claws, so we created knives. We couldn’t run fast, so we created cars. We didn’t have wings, so we invented airplanes etc. We were able to use plants to our advantage (agriculture) and animals to our advantage (domestication) and subdue and capture animals like gorillas who are many times our size and strength. So despite being such a weak disadvantaged animal, our freakishly large brains allowed us to become the most powerful and prosperous animal on the planet.

Analogously, Oprah had almost every disadvantage. She was born a poor dark skinned black female in Jim Crow rural Mississippi (the lynching capital of the world). She was illegitimate, sexually abused, became overweight, and was not considered pretty. Yet she was able to adapt all these disadvantages to her advantage. She used her weight problems to bond with millions of Americans. She shared her sexual abuse to help lead millions of abuse victims to recovery. She very skillfully used her race to become America’s black best friend. She used her poor upbringing to gain sympathy. Pretty soon, Forbes magazine was ranking her as the richest self-made woman in America, and some years, arguably the world.

But Oprah didn’t just achieve wealth (economic capital), she also achieved status (social capital). Time magazine ranks her as the most influential woman on the planet. When millions of Americans voted in 2005 to elect the Greatest American in history, Oprah was the only female to make the top 10, making her at that moment, the most worshiped woman ever within the world’s sole superpower, and perhaps as a corollary, the most powerful woman in the world. A woman so powerful that when she was disrespected by a clerk in Switzerland, the country officially apologized. Books she recommended would become colossal bestsellers, and some economists credit her with almost single-handedly putting a black man in the white house.

She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president. Other successful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, had to be publicly slapped down before they could move forward. Even Condi has had to play the protegé with Bush. None of this happened to Oprah – she is a straight ahead success story.

And Bill O’Reilly said:

this is a woman that came from nothing to rise up to be the most powerful woman, I think, in the world. I think Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the world, not just in America. That’s – anybody who goes on her program immediately benefits through the roof. I mean, she has a loyal following; she has credibility; she has talent; and she’s done it on her own to become fabulously wealthy and fabulously powerful.

So just as humans overcame adversity to become the world’s most prosperous and powerful animal, Oprah overcame adversity, to become the world’s most powerful and prosperous woman. Just as humans were able to outdistance all other animals because we’re the world’s biggest brained animal (relative to body size), arguably Oprah was able to outdistance all other women, because she’s arguably the world’s biggest brained woman.

The world’s biggest brained woman?

I have heard Oprah state on her show that she has to have her hats custom made because her head measures 25.25 inches around, a cranium so large that two wigs had to be sewn together to fit her for her Oscar nominated performance in The Color Purple. This equates to 641.4 mm. According to the U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey Database, by Claire C. Gordon (Final Report, October 1996), in 1995, a sample of 3,482 active duty females in the U.S. army had their heads measured. The mean circumference was 546.6 mm and the standard deviation (SD) was 15.1. Assuming this sample is roughly representative of adult female U.S. crania, Oprah’s head perimeter is 6.3 SD above the mean of American women. Assuming a Gaussian distribution, fewer than one in five billion women in America should have cranium that large. There are of course, not five billion women in America or even the world, let alone the developed world where nutrition is optimum for brain growth; thus Oprah has arguably the world’s largest female cranium (excluding female hydrocephalics, where head enlargement reflects cerebrospinal fluid not brain mass, and autistic females, where enlargement reflects a brain that was super-sized in childhood, before shrinking in adolescence).

Of course head circumference is just a crude proxy for brain size. Some formulas very crudely attempt to make the conversion. For example the late Professor J. Phillipe Rushton argued that a simple conversion would be to use the formula for calculating the volume of a hemisphere (V = circumfence3/118.4). Plugging Oprah’s 64.14 cm head circumference into this equation gives a cranial capacity of 2,229 cm3, a truly unimaginable figure. However Rushton only validated this formula in young Asian children; he never approved it for adults or all races. One reason why it might give exaggerated results in adults is that it does not subtract the fat and skin around the skull which is thicker in adults than in children and probably adds 200 cm3. Subtracting those 200 cm3 brings Oprah down to 2,029 cm3.

The biggest brained member of both her race AND her gender?

If it weren’t astonishing enough that Oprah is arguably the world’s biggest brained woman (or at least arguabley was in her youth when her brain size was maximized and the world population was lesser), she is/was also arguably the world’s biggest brained black. Professor Rushton found that a sample of 2,676 African-American Army personnel measured in 1988, had a mean cranial capacity of 1,362 cm3 (SD = 95). Assuming this sample is representative of black people reared in the developed world, Oprah’s estimated cranial capacity of 2,029 cm3 would be 7 SD above their mean, implying a normalized rarity of less than one in 190 billion! Of course this is not a perfectly apples to apples comparison since the brain sizes of the black Army personnel were estimated from head length, head breadth and head height, while I have estimated Oprah’s brain size from circumference, and differences in head shape can give different estimates of cranial capacity. But it’s also worth noting that if adjustments for fat-free body weight were made, Oprah’s cranium would be even more impressive, because in mixed-sex comparisons that are not adjusted for body size, women are penalized because head size correlates moderately with fat-free mass of which women have much less.

The World’s only black billionaire?

If it weren’t astonishing enough that Oprah is arguably the world’s most powerful and prosperous woman (or at least was at the peak of her and America’s power), she is/was also arguably the world’s most successful black. She is almost always the only African American on Forbes annual list of the 400 richest Americans and her estimated net worth of $2.9 billion makes her the richest African American of all time.

From 2004-2006, she was one of only three blacks on Forbes annual list of all the billionaires in the world (not just America). However the other two black billionaires may not have been of predominantly black ancestry. One was Saudi Arabian Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al Amoudi, whose father is from Yemen (a population that is typically Middle Eastern, not black). While his mother is from the black nation of Ethiopia, geneticist Cavalli-Sforza estimated that nearly half of that country’s genes originated in West Asia rather than black Africa. Given both parents, it’s very possible that Al Amoudi is of predominantly Caucasoid ancestry.

The other black billionaire was Canada’s Michael Lee-Chin, who has two Jamaican grandparents, and two East Asian grandparents. Seeing as Jamaicans are not of purely black origin (there is non-trivial white admixture) and two of his grandparents are from cold East Asia (the opposite of sub-Saharan Africa), it’s likely that Lee-Chin is also less than 50% black at the genetic level. Perhaps because of the racial ambiguity of the two men, Oprah was for several years regarded as the only black billionaire in the world, not just in America, though in recent years, a few other unambiguously black billionaires have emerged in Africa.

Child of the Corn

Oprah’s Hairstyles. N.d. Photograph. Oprah.com. Web. 16 Oct. 2012

At least in America, self-made billionaires tend to be brilliant. Ultra-big brained people tend also to be brilliant. Since Oprah is both a very self-made billionaire and likely an ultra-big brained person, statistically she is likely to be especially brilliant. Though Oprah has made billions off her populist image as an average woman, and seems brutally honest about her cognitive shortcomings, evidence of exceptional intelligence can be found in her childhood. During her formative years, she was raised by her grandmother, Miss Hattie Maie (a maid) in rural Mississippi, where Oprah was reading and reciting Bible verses by age three. Oprah fondly recalls how the women at the all black church where Oprah would give recitations would turn to her grandmother and say: Miss Hattie Maie, that child sure can talk. That child’s gifted. That child’s gonna talk her way out of Mississippi.

Jealous of her talents and resentful of her messiah complex, the other kids would later derisively nickname her “the preacher”, a la Stephen King’s Children of the Corn and attempt to beat her up, but the adaptable young Oprah would always talk her way out of it.

At age six, she recalls writing her Kindergarten teacher a note that said:

Dear Miss Newe,

I do not belong here because I can read and I know a lot of big words: Elephant, hippopotamus.

She was quickly moved to first grade, and would go on to skip the second grade too.

[Addendum, July 8, 2014: this post is a revision of an article I published many years ago]